Rev-Share Sites Still Viable for Residual Income

While eHow.com's Writers' Compensation Program was the best revenue-share opportunity I've experienced for residual income, it's no longer an option as far as adding new articles directly through the site. Still, there are other places to go for a similar model: you write content and get paid according to the ad revenue your articles generate.

Demand Studios, Bukisa, HubPages, Squidoo, and Infobarrel are all sources of residual income for me -- several more eggs in the proverbial basket, if you will. In addition to their income, articles I've written on these sites provide backlinks, site or blog traffic and/or brand recognition in several niches.

Out of this handful of revenue-sharing content sites, some do better than others for page ranks and traffic and thus earnings.

Here's how they stacked up in March 2011:

Demand Media Studios revenue-share: $114.58 with 21 eHow articles

Bukisa: $29.39 with 17 articles

HubPages: $29.59 with 6 articles

InfoBarrel: $3.81 with 6 articles

Total ...... $177.37 with 50 articles, for an average of $3.55/per article.

With many hundred articles on the right sites, you can still make a viable residual income through revenue-sharing programs. A thousand articles with that average would give you $3,547 per month. You can actually do much better than that; some of these articles were written when I was just starting out and didn't know much about what niches perform well. By specializing in one or two areas which you know well and whose audience you understand, you will see a higher level of success than the random collection of articles here represents.

While I am currently working almost exclusively on my niche websites, I do still recommend some rev-share writing for those new to online writing and marketing. Writing content articles is a great way to experiment with several or dozens of niche topics. You can figure out what you enjoy researching and writing about, what you want to specialize in and what topics are most profitable. For me, eHow was very well-paid market research and has certainly contributed to the successes I'm seeing in creating my own niche sites and blogs.

That being said, don't wait too long to branch out to your own properties. Once you've identified a good niche topic, done keyword research and learned the basics of site creation and promotion, start a site of your own and monetize it with ads and affiliate links. Revenue-sharing sites are great, but having your own online properties is even better. For web hosting, site design and other recommended resources, see my Tools and Training page.

What revenue-sharing content sites have you earned well with? Do you still write for them?

Backlink Experiment: Before & After

As mentioned in my past few posts, I've been busy backlinking my niche sites and blogs and eHow articles to improve their placement in the search engine result pages (SERPs), increase traffic and ultimately to earn more through ad clicks and affiliate purchases.

One of the eHow articles I backlinked showed a dramatic increase in views and earnings that can't be attributed to seasonal factors as it is one of those "evergreen" articles not particularly affected by the time of year. In fact, its previous best month was in the spring.

Here's what How to Get Applications for Free Personal Government Grants looked like at the end of October, before the backlink:

And here's how it's doing today, with views jumping by 2,000 in less than two months and earnings nearly quadrupling:

After a decent first two months when it was initially published, the article had nosedived for the next three months until I gave it a good article database backlink on Oct. 29, 2010. From that point, it took off:

I found this little one-article example very interesting -- crazy how one simple back-link (albeit from a very well-ranked source) could have such a profound effect so quickly.

Have I convinced you yet about the power of a good backlink? If not, I'll follow up shortly with an update on my affiliate earnings in recent months and how backlinks have contributed to that success, too.

The New eHow

As of a week ago, eHow has dramatically changed its article submission and publication process. Gone are the days when anyone could register as an eHow writer and submit content for instant publication. New members must now apply through Demand Studios to publish articles on eHow.com and current member-writers have either been accepted as Demand Studios writers or notified that they didn't pass muster. Those whose article acceptance rating (the ratio of articles written and published to articles deleted in the eHow article sweeps) was not high enough to warrant automatic acceptance can apply to Demand Studios separately.

All articles currently on eHow that were written in the Writers Compensation program (WCP) will stay live and continue to earn money, no matter the author's new status.

What's good about these changes?
The overall quality of eHow articles should go up as junk accounts are closed to new submissions and poorly written articles and spam become negligible. With an application process and article review/ edit sequence, articles published on eHow should be overall of a higher caliber than some of what has been published in the past.

Payment for revenue-share articles could go up or down, depending on whether or not the algorithm remains the same and whether the changes result in higher page rank and traffic for eHow or not.

What's bad?
 New writers who don't get accepted to Demand Studios won't have the opportunity to learn the ropes of online writing on eHow, nor benefit from the feedback of the community to improve their writing.

Demand Studios will own all articles submitted to eHow. Previously, eHow writers retained copyright and ownership of their articles and could edit, delete and republish as they saw fit. Now, new articles become the sole property of Demand Studios/ Demand Media and all rights to the content will be retained by the company, not by the writer.

 What's my advice?
Start by clarifying your online writing goals to yourself. Write them down. Consider your involvement with eHow in light of your online writing career and what direction you want it to take. The eHow/ Demand Studios setup will appeal to many freelance online writers who enjoy the flexibility of writing as much or as little as they like in any given week, the availability of up-front pay and a library of titles from which to choose and consistent, reliable payments.

The signing-away of article ownership and rights will be a deal-breaker to many independent, entrepreneur-minded writers who wish to own the means of production, not sell their articles piecemeal to a large company that can do with them as it likes. 

As for me, I have been a registered Demand Studios writer for nearly three years and while I wrote hundreds of articles through DS while I needed the up-front pay, as soon as I had my residual income streams at the level I needed, I switched to writing almost exclusively for myself with content on eHow.com to which I retained rights, as well as multiple niche websites, a few blogs, an info product and content on other revenue-sharing sites.

Will I personally write articles through the Demand Studios platform? Yes, but with some hesitation and with lesser volume than on eHow. In 2009, I published 15 revenue-sharing articles via my Demand Studios writer account, and added another one this morning (it's still pending). In my next post on this blog, I'll share how those DS rev-sharing articles have performed.

My advice remains the same as it has over the years: diversify your online income streams. Whether or not you decide to submit articles to the new eHow, build up your article presence elsewhere on the web, especially on sites and blogs that you yourself own.

With these recent eHow changes in mind, what's your online writing plan going forward?

When eHow is Down ...

Publishing, or trying to publish, eHow articles lately has been a frustrating failure as glitches prevent new articles from coming online or even, at times, saving as a draft.

As aggravating as it is to write eHow articles and be unable to publish them for days and even weeks,  I've learned over the past few years that the down time can actually be a huge motivator to do other things to improve eHow earnings and build related residual income sources.

10 Things to Do When eHow Publishing is Down

1. Boost your five top-earning articles with two new backlinks each.
2. Revive your three slowest-earning articles with a new backlink apiece. 
3. Research two unexplored niches and create three unique titles in each niche for future eHow articles.
4. Build a blog on a broad topic -- ie crafts, cooking, personal finance -- to link to from your eHow articles' Resources section. Write several posts and monetize with ads and affiliate links.
5. Sign up on other revenue-sharing sites, and use your top-earning eHow articles as inspiration for your first articles on the other sites. 
6. Try writing lenses on Squidoo. 
7. Take pictures of a project you complete -- from making donuts to waxing your car -- to use in a future eHow article and "I did It!" projects on eHow.
8. Make a goal to increas your eHow earnings over the next three months. How many new articles will you write (once the tool is fixed)? How many backlinks will you create?
9. Browse free photos sites and download copyright-free stock images, along with photographer name to give credit, and have them ready for easy access when composing future articles.
10. Write eHow articles. Even if you can't publish them right away. 

What do you do when the eHow publishing tool doesn't work?

Thoughts on eHow UK Compensation

I'll be honest. I haven't closely followed the eHow UK debacle over the past few months. I'm just now getting caught up on other eHow members' thoughts and research on the topic, conveyed through blogs and forum posts and discussions.

For those who haven't followed or participated in the discussions, here's the 30-second version as I understand it. In about August of 2009, eHow created a "sister site," ehow.co.uk, which basically mirrored the US-version except for a unique front page -- the featured articles differ from those on the regular site.

However, Demand Media used US-member-submitted eHow articles on the eHow UK site. According to the TOS, they do have the rights to do so.  But writers were unhappy that they basically copied everyone's content and published it on another site without discussion or permission from the writers first. Personally, I don't think this was done with malicious forethought; I don't think they really gave it much thought at all. But either way, some members felt it was not right.

In the face of uproar from its members, eHow administration decided to redirect visitors on the UK site to the original US-based articles, but eventually just pulled the plug and removed all US-member content from the UK side (some articles remain and flaws are being worked out).

Because of the persistence of eHow member-writers who asked whether articles re-posted to the UK site would receive reimbursement through the WCP, and who felt their overall revenue from eHow suffered due to their articles on the UK site appearing higher in searches than their US articles, eHow announced that it would give "generous compensation" to all WCP participants whose articles has been temporarily published on the UK site without permission.

This compensation arrived with the February payment of January earnings. For those who wondered, and in the interest of full disclosure, I received $140.

Personally, I feel that this compensation is more than fair -- simply because I never noticed any decline in my eHow earnings and any traffic that was taken from my US articles was likely minuscule, in my opinion. For one thing, the UK site has a fraction the traffic that the US one does. This is a comparison of traffic for the two sites from January 2010; traffic in the late months of 2009 was even more disparate:

I also did Google searches in December of my top-earning eHow articles and didn't see any UK-based results, just the ones on the US site. So I'm not really sure how much compensation, if any, the UK site took from my articles.

I do know that there is chatter among Google Adsense users that advertising revenue across the web is down, likely because of economic factors worldwide.

Is eHow committed to its WCP, or Writers Compensation Program? I believe they are, or it would not still be inexistence. When it first launched, in 2007, it was their big focus, and things have changed since then. Perhaps there is not as much enthusiasm within Demand Media as they had previously for the WCP writers. In 2008, eHow held a member event, weHow, in Santa Monica CA, to which I was invited and attended.The whole focus was on the WCP and participation on the eHow.com website. They even gave recognition to the top eHow earner in attendance, so earnings were being promoted and encouraged.

In 2009, the event was focused instead on the new "I did It" feature that pays no compensation to those who submit I did It stories. So the focus has shifted a bit, perhaps to encourage people to join eHow for the user experience and not just the earnings potential.

Demand Studios writers, who provide content for eHow.com, seem to receive more attention, benefits and support than the "users" in the WCP. This is simply a statement of fact; it doesn't bother me. When you consider that DS writers are paid a flat $15 fee for most article, while I've had dozens of articles earn $100 or more, including several thousand-dollar eHow articles, they can keep their better forum and monthly grant contests and I'll keep my revenue sharing.

But even if eHow in general doesn't particularly love us WCP writers anymore (who can blame them?), the sheer quantity of user-submitted content, and the fact that we retain rights to our work, indicates to me that they would have a very hard time just nixing the program altogether. And I contend that they don't want to end it. For all we know, the eHow UK beta site may have included a long-term plan for extending the WCP and eventually increasing compensation based on UK revenue on WCP articles. I truly don't think anyone at Demand wanted to "steal" from the eHow writers.

And I believe that eHow remains one of the very best sites for building residual income today.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours?

What Makes a $1,000+ eHow Article?

At some point last month, another eHow article moved into the $1,000+ slot among my top earners. Now that I have four articles that have each earned over $1k, maybe I can shed some light on what it takes to make that much from one simple how-to article.

But first of all, can I just say, how cool is that?! When I first started writing eHow articles almost two and a half years ago, I had only an inkling of the potential for good earnings and certainly didn't expect to see articles do that well. Neither did anyone else -- except maybe a few folks at Demand Media.

Now, about those articles. What goes into a thousand-dollar eHow article? And more importantly, how can we all write more of them?

Some things are fairly consistent with top earning articles. The main traits these four have in common are good SEO, uniqueness and worthwhile content. Three have all those aspects; one admittedly possesses just the first two. Three are personal finance or career-related topics, the other is a home and garden article. Here's what I've learned about their similarities:

• SEO, Search Engine Optimization: Researching good keywords and properly placing them in your article is the best strategy for earning with online content, especially on eHow. I use free tools such as Wordtracker and Google Adwords to help with this aspect. When you link to your article from other sites, use the main keywords as anchor text.
  
• Uniqueness: Are the keywords you want to use already the main topic of another eHow article? Or are they so competitive that a Google search returns pages of quality, relative results all with good SEO-titles? If either or both these are in the affirmative, you'll do better looking for another aspect of that niche and switching to different keywords. To earn well, your keywords need to be unique on eHow and in a somewhat unsaturated niche online.
  
• Content: Make sure the introduction and body of your eHow article provide the information your reader is searching for. Your article should be in-depth enough to provide a good reader experience and convey the knowledge you're sharing. Fluff pieces won't make it to the top (with rare exception).
  
• A little luck: One of my articles, the one that's garnered $1,900+ so far, is based on keywords that showed very few searches at the time of the writing. However, I wrote the article on a bit of a hunch and it played out. There were no other eHow articles using those keywords when I wrote it, and when the topic became popular it was one of the top results in the search engines.
  

Each of my top four articles is about two years old -- they were written at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. While time is important to see full earnings potential, high earners will often show their value early on. One of these articles earned $400 in a single month only six months after it was published.

For more on maximizing earnings, check out my ebook: How to Earn Passive Income on eHow

Do you have some high earners on eHow? Share your tips with other readers in the comments section.

eHow Articles New Approval Process

Articles submitted on eHow.com by member-writers now go through a process in which they are evaluated and subsequently approved and published, or rejected, by the system. It's unclear whether the process is currently moderated by actual content editors, however.

I have published four new eHow articles since the new system was activated on my account, and it works very smoothly at this point. After clicking the "publish" button, you'll see a "thank you" screen indicating that your article has been accepted into the system and will be evaluate shortly, usually within ten minutes. In the meantime, the article status under "My Articles" will appear as Pending.

All of my articles were live on the site within 10-20 minutes of clicking publish. This is excellent, because as content writers know, some niches are hot for a limited time and getting your content online quickly is important. If the approval lag time was days or even hours, it would potentially discourage writers used to instant publication.

New to eHow? Learn how to get eHow earnings from your content!

My opinion of the new process is that, if it eliminates post-publishing article deletion, it is a huge improvement and will make a positive difference on eHow both by preventing inferior content and spammy articles as well as ensuring that articles published on the site stay published and are not deleted months or even years after they were submitted.

So who or what decides whether an article passes muster? At this point, it's not clear and there's been no official or unofficial word from eHow. If live humans are behind it, the article moderators are not necessarily eHow employees sitting in their offices in CA; most likely, they are freelancers who have been chosen for the job much like those who determined which articles would be deleted in the eHow Article Sweeps.

Perhaps there is a computer algorithm that checks the content for plagiarism, advertising/spam, and flags potential violators for a real review.

To increase your odds of success, be sure your submitted work meets eHow submission guidelines and is quality, relevant, well-written information in true how-to format. Provide original material that will help the reader. Don't just produce fluff content with keywords chosen to earn money -- eHow is not going to accept it.

UPDATE: This is from Julie, one of the eHow community managers:

Hi,

The New Article Review does not exempt an article for review during future Article Sweeps. Currently when your article is submitted for publication and "pending" the following is evaluated:

1. Is the article a duplicate title? Does the title already exist in the system?

2. Plagiarism check

In the future we hope to do a more robust review of the article but currently we only do a basic processing of the article when it is first submitted. Therefore, the article will then be checked for compliance with Publishing Guidelines and other site rules by our editors during the Article Sweeps.

Hope this clears up any questions or confusion.

Thanks!

Julie

Have you noticed the new approval system for your eHow articles? What's you opinion?

(Photo from eHow.com's thank you page.)